[Arny Krueger[_5_]]

"Audio_Empire" wrote in message
...

There are differences in electronic equipment and I'm convinced that some
day there
will be tests that will reveal them.

That the equpment is different is fact. The question at hand is not about
that fact. The question at hand is about the audible significance of those
differences.

The use of audio gear seems to be pretty straight-forward and simple. We
apply audio signals to audio gear, turn it into sound in listening rooms
using loudspeakers and headphones, and listen to it.

The symmetry between listening tests and listening to music for enjoyment
can be as complete as we have the patience to make it so.

It is ironic to me that much of the so-called evidence supporting the
existence of mysterious equipment properties that elude sophisticated
testing is obtained by such crude means. It even eludes all known attempts
to duplicate the crude means while imposing basic a few basic, simple bias
controls by the least intrusive means found after extensive investigation
and experimentation.

If you are talking about technical tests then the solution to our problem
can be found in multivariate calculus. It is a mathematical fact that any
system with a finite dimensional state can be fully analyzed. An audio
channel has two variables being time and intensity. It is very simple.
Mathematicians have analyzed these two variables for maybe 100 years
(analysis acutally started no less recently than with Fourier).


I've been in electronics long enough to know that
you will never uncover a piece of gear's flaws if your suit of
measurements keep
measuring the wrong thing.

That's a truism, but without more specifics it is just idle speculation.

Unfortunately, I don't know (any more than anyone else)
what we would test to account for the differences in modern amps (very
small
differences, probably not worth the effort) or DACs (much larger
differences).

What differences are we testing for - things that only show up in sighted
evaluations or evaluations that are semi-, demi-, or quasi controlled?

Once we learned how to do reliable listening tests back in the 1970s there
have been no mysteries - what we hear we measure and vice versa given that
we measure enough to be audible.

As others have pointed out one of the first casualties of reliable listening
tests was the hysteria over slew rate induced distoriton.

None of these things are addressed in any test suite I've seen.

None of what? So far I see no actual description of something with hands and
feet.

Yes, we measure frequency
response, IM and harmonic distortion, channel separation, impulse response
(in
DACs) perhaps we use an oscilloscope to look at square waves to measure
low and
high frequency phase shift, but none of those really address things like
the difference
between the imaging ability of two DACs, for instance,

Yet another audiophile myth that dies a quick death when you start doing
adequately controlled listening tests.